With the development of the communication technology, more and more data centers employ the virtualization technology, which abstracts and then rearranges the computer system hardware, and a virtualization software layer runs between the computer hardware platform and the Operation System (OS). The virtualization software layer is generally called as hypervisor and capable of running multiple OSs on a plurality of computer hardware platforms.
A data center employing the virtualization technology no longer runs a single operation system, thus the backup and deployment for the data center gradually change from the backup and deployment of the OS and the application program to those of the Virtual Machines (VMs) at the data center, and the VMs are usually orderly backed up or deployed. This backup mode is generally notified to the OSs of the VMs by the management software of the data center, so as to complete all the operations. But the backups are just limited to respective VMs, while the associations between the VMs cannot be backed up. That is, the backup of each VM is completed under the OS of the VM, while there is no association between the backups of respective VMs.
During the research and practice of the prior art, the inventor finds that in the current implementation, when the VMs of the data center are directly associated with each other, and their running states depend on one another, it is complicated to back up each separate system (corresponding to one VM) of the data center and then perform a separate recovery, and a mis-operation may be easily caused, thus the backed up data center is not fully consistent with the original data center system. In addition, the data center system may be composed of a plurality of computation nodes, and the dynamic data (memory information) of each VM will be probably distributed at multiple different computation nodes, thus the data backup made by a VM may influence other VMs running at the same node.